timekeeping on jail servers

[Chuck Swiger]

On Dec 21, 2007, at 10:24 AM, Bill Moran wrote:
>> ntpdate -B should slew the time slowly.  (According to the manpage.)
>
> Not generally suitable for cron because it can take longer to slew
> than it does for the next cron execution to occur, which would then
> result in multiple ntpdate programs fighting each other (not sure
> what the effect of this would be).

ntpdate -B calls adjtime(2) and then exits, rather than the process  
staying around; calling it a second time is fine but it isn't  
especially useful to keep running ntpdate via cron.

One should run ntpd instead unless the system in question is  
desperately short on memory and a ~1MB RSS process is a burden.

> If you ask me, the -B option is available for people who want to
> totally hose timekeeping on their system.

Somewhat.  :-)

-- 
-Chuck